Focus on accuracy

"Quality is an on going journey. It's never
done," said Margaret Holt, customer service
editor of the Chicago Tribune. "Just
when you think you've got something fixed, it ain't. It requires
vigilance, and everybody internally needs to know
that it matters."

Since 1992 the Chicago Tribune has hired a proofreader
to do an errors-per-page annual report, so the newsroom
can track errors from year to year. "We were abysmal
starting out," she said. "I think we were as high as 4.82
errors per page."

However, the Tribune's accuracy program kicked into
high gear in 1995 when it suffered an accuracy "meltdown."
A senior writer misidentified a top Tribune executive
in an obituary of a beloved editor. That executive was
"not happy," Holt said. The obit was published on a Saturday,
and by Monday, the executive ordered the Tribune to
establish an error policy.

Holt and other editors began to research accuracy policies,
investigated quality-control programs in other industries
and held meetings for employees to vent - "and boy,
did they vent."

Holt discovered a guiding principle: "In any enterprise,
work is a process. At any point along the way that you can
identify the systemic errors versus the human errors, you
can address the systemic errors and do better work."

Holt's job is to deal with errors by quantifying the process.
When people make mistakes, they fill out an error
form and talk about what happened to "track back on every
single error."

Internal credibility is key to the Tribune's process. Editors
and reporters "need to know that you value accuracy,
that you care about it and that you're going to act on it."

When the Tribune launched its program, which requires
naming people who make mistakes, the reaction
was "ugly." Copy editors were particularly concerned.

"Everybody on the desk was terrified," Holt said, adding
that they feared the program would be "one more way to
do a public flogging of the desk." Reporters were thrilled,
she said, because they were sure the process would reveal
editors to be "jerks" who "mess with my copy."

In fact, Holt said, she found that 50 percent of errors
happen at the "front end of the process," which is newsgathering.
Only 15 to 18 percent of errors related to copy
and source editing.

"This is not a gotcha exercise," she said. "This is our
good faith effort because we want to do better work."

Tribune editors learned that the people who make the
most errors are sometimes the paper's best performers.
This is particularly true on the desk, where stronger editors
are more likely to handle the most difficult story. And
weaker writing gets a lot of editing, so more errors are
likelier to slip through with good writers.

A key question on the Tribune's error forms is how the
error was discovered, which is a "huge indicator of the
internal awareness about accuracy and how well we're doing
in the newsroom communicating it." Holt compared
the percentage of internally reported errors to a good
cholesterol number. When that number reaches about 35
percent, she said, "that speaks to the health of the system"
because people are aware of the need for accuracy and
feel free to report mistakes. However, when that number
drops, the total number of errors starts to climb.

"What we're about is doing better work, not necessarily
reducing the number of corrections, because they are
not the same thing," she said. "What we want is a place
where people feel free to talk about mistakes and that we
can be candid about them and really be almost clinical on
behalf of the reader so that we can learn from them and
do better work."

And don't forget to correct archived stories because
there is no "statute of limitations" on errors. A mistake
in a previous story is likely to show up again unless it's
corrected.

"The sin is not making mistakes," Holt said, because making
no mistakes means that people are afraid to take risks and
try something new. "The sin is not learning from them."

In addition to ongoing training for all editors, the
Tribune also held training sessions in writing and in libel
laws. The result was a "dramatic" decline in errors.

She sat down with one department and went over its
errors for the past year, which she had categorized. The
department then went through training sessions specifically aimed at preventing those errors; staffers were encouraged
to share ideas for preventing errors. A columnist
with 35 years of experience suggested a "blindingly obvious"
strategy: "You should not ever conduct an interview
until you've asked them how to spell their name and what
their current title is." Despite his long service, the columnist
saw the value of the training.

"We can never take these basics for granted," Holt said.
"They jeopardize our business."